Of course people would scramble, but it has nothing to do with how much value you can screw users out of using advertising, because even if ads were worth $0 re

Of course people would scramble, but it has nothing to do with how much value you can screw users out of using advertising, because even if ads were worth $0 revenue, search is so valuable you could just plain charge users. This is why there is essentially no relationship between the value of search and the ad revenue. The value of the ad revenue could be $0, and the value to the user would still be $100+/month. And because the consumer surplus is literally an order of magnitude or two more than the subscription fee quoted, that is prima facie a case that a subscription search engine could have a marginal benefit of >$10 compared to the free ad-supported engine. It, or the subset of searches you opt to use it for, only needs to deliver a little more value to be worth it. Quite aside from the problem of Google Search being increasingly jammed full of ads, wasting your time, or any distortion of ranking, people just plain dislike and avoid ads (https://www.gwern.net/Ads https://www.gwern.net/Ads).